5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Website’s Usability

Usability is one of the major and often overlooked aspects of web design. Indeed, it should be considered even prior to the commencement of designing any website be it an eCommerce site or one that just provides basic information about a product. Usability should be part of the entire website or software development process. But usability does not stop there. After the website is launched, usability testing should dictate what enhancements should be made to the live website. In this article, I will be discussing five simple ways in which you can improve the usability of your website.

1. Focus on Readability

Readability is one of the signs that indicate website usability problems. If your site has readability issues, then there is a high chance that your visitors will get annoyed and abandon it. This essentially means you lose potential customers. Hence, you must take the necessary steps to ensure that your site has no readability issues.

In an earlier article, we explained how you can make your site more readable and hence usable by following typography usability guidelines. Adequate amount of white space, proper paragraph formatting and displaying of lists using bullet points will also contribute towards making your website content more readable. Additionally, you can place your design elements such as sidebars, banners and text boxes on your site in such a way that they do not distract the users when they are going through the site.

2. Background Color, Texture and Contrast

There are various considerations that need to be made before selecting color. One of the main reasons is because of the ways in which different colors affect the user’s psychology and experience. Before selecting the background color of your site, spend some time and think what color your end-users would prefer. For instance, if you are designing a website for ecologists, you must go for colors associated with earth and ecology viz shades of green, brown or blue. The same goes for selecting the pattern or textures, used in the background.

Also, check whether there is a contrast between the background color and font color. Otherwise, it becomes difficult for the users to differentiate between the font and the background.

3. Selection of Images and their placement

Make it a ground rule to use high quality and relevant images on your site. Choose your images carefully so that they immediately appeal to your target audience and make the necessary impact on them. For example, if it is a food blog, you can use images of recipes which seem to have been torn out of an old cookbook. This will set your site apart from other food blogs.

Additionally, make sure that your images do not look out of the place; an image which is not placed properly, sticks out like a sore thumb on the website. This may distract the end-users and they will have a negative impression about your site. For more advice about optimization of images for usability, you can read this recent blog post from Chris Fernandez.

4. Navigation

Nowadays, most of the users access the websites from their mobile devices apart from desktops and laptops. Therefore, you must make sure that your users are able to navigate your website easily on their mobile devices as well. To start with, you must select a simple layout and use it on all your web pages. Additionally, you must do away with horizontal scrolling which the users find really irritating irrespective of the device they use to browse the site.

5. Effortless Usage

Your users must use your site with ease. You can make this possible in a number of ways like:

Limited scrolling – be it horizontal or vertical

Making it easy for your users to accomplish their tasks such as taking a call-to-action with few clicks

Not asking users to fill unnecessary, lengthy forms

Making sure that users are able to identify links and call-to-action buttons easily

Highlighting new arrivals or important products or services on the site so that your regular visitors can find them with ease

Conclusion

These were what I consider as being some of the most important areas where one should direct their effort in order to design and develop usable websites. Each point can obviously be expanded to open several other usability guidelines. Apply them the next time you design a website or when re-evaluating an existing website and I am sure that you will observe a marginal difference in your metrics. For more quick general tips on improving your website usability, I would suggest reading the following articles:

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About Hazel Raoult

Hazel Raoult works for PLAVEB, a leading ecommerce solutions company located in Los Angeles. She likes following basketball and also enjoys practicing yoga in her free time.

Andrew Gill

I believe this bullet point is not a helpful statement

“Limited scrolling – be it horizontal or vertical”

Limiting scrolling often impacts on other features such as clear headers and helpful use of white space. I would generally agree with a statement such as “try to limit scrolling to only vertical or horizontal”, additionally as the most common paradigm is vertical then attempting to remove horizontal scrolling is normally a superior method.

Limiting scrolling for the sake of it normally results in poor design decisions. It is better to say if a page requires scrolling confirm that it is necessary, can the language be made more concise or can the elements be reworked to generally remove scrolling. Being overzealous in this aspect can lead to lost of useful information from articles and websites designed to only look good on small screen devices, and upset users who have more space and would benefit from more information.